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Authorities Say Minister's Wife Confesses
Mar 24 1:31 PM US/Eastern
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By WOODY BAIRD
Associated Press Writer

SELMER, Tenn.

The wife of a slain minister confessed to shooting him at their church parsonage, then fleeing to Alabama, where she was found the following night with their three young daughters, authorities said Friday.

Mary Winkler told investigators she shot her husband on Wednesday, Selmer Police investigator Roger Rickman said.

Rickman declined to discuss a motive for the shooting but said Winkler had been "very cooperative." She was charged Friday in Tennessee with first-degree murder, and police in Alabama said she agreed to waive extradition. Rickman expected her to be returned to Selmer during the weekend.

"To my knowledge, the children saw nothing," Rickman said. He said he wasn't sure if they knew what had happened to their father.

Matthew Winkler, the 31-year-old minister at Selmer's Church of Christ, was found dead Wednesday night in a bedroom of the parsonage after church members went looking for him because he had missed an evening service.

Police said the home didn't appear to have been broken into, but Winkler's wife and children _ Breanna, 1; Mary Alice, 6; and Patricia, 8 _ were gone.

Mary Winkler, 32, was spotted Thursday night with the children as they left a Waffle House restaurant in Orange Beach, Ala., 340 miles south of their home.

Orange Beach Police Chief Billy Wilkins said that she had rented a condo on the beach but that she hadn't stayed there.

A custody hearing was scheduled Friday afternoon in Foley, Ala., where a juvenile Court judge will decide whether Matthew Winkler's parents can take custody of the three children.

Mary Winkler's father, reached in her hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., declined to comment Friday.

"I don't have anything to say. I appreciate your interest. I just have nothing to say right now," Clark Freeman told The Associated Press.

The news of the shooting death of the third-generation minister shocked those who knew him in Selmer, a town of about 4,600 in West Tennessee.

Matthew Winkler was hired at the Fourth Street Church in February said Wilburn Ash, an elder at the church. The congregation quickly came to love his straight-by-the-Bible sermons. Church members also took to his wife, who they described as a quiet, unassuming woman who was a substitute teacher at the elementary school.

"They were a nice family," said former Selmer Mayor Jimmy Whittington, who worked with the minister collecting donations for hurricane victims last year. "They just blended in."

Mary and Matthew Winkler met at the Church of Christ-affiliated Freed- Hardeman University in Henderson, where his father, also a minister, is an adjunct professor.

On Thursday, members of the Selmer congregation gathered inside the one-story brick church.

"I can't believe this would happen," said Pam Killingsworth, a church member and assistant principal at Selmer Elementary.

"The kids are just precious, and she was precious," Killingsworth said. "He was the one of the best ministers we've ever had _ just super charisma."

LTS TRN 2 wrote:Update: The Pastor, it turns out, was a 31-year-old abusive control freak whose brand of Christer cultism decreed among other twisted rules that no musical instruments be played in church. Wifey said fuck you, have a bullet, and now he's properly retired, the world a slightly better place.
That is all.